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It is feared an Australian man was on board a jet which crashed
in Peru, killing 40 people.

State-run airline TANS said its Boeing 737-200 plane with 100
people aboard - possibly including an Australian man - attempted an
emergency landing without its landing gear in swampland three
kilometres from the remote Pucallpa airport, 780 kilometres
north-east of Lima.

An airline spokeswoman told theage.com.au the
Australian passenger's name was Tomas Kirralee. But an Australian
embassy spokeswoman said they had no confirmation any Australians
were on board.

The man's name does not appear on a list compiled by
the airline of wounded passengers published on a Peruvian radio station website.

The Associated Press quoted police Lieutenant David Mori as
saying that three foreigners had so far been confirmed dead: an
American woman, an Italian man, and a Colombian woman.

The accident happened at 3.06pm (6.06am AEST), TANS said.

A spokesman for Foreign Affairs Parliamentary Secretary Bruce
Billson said the government was aware of the plane crash. "There is
no confirmation that an Australian was aboard the plane,'' he
said.

Mr Billson's spokesman said Australia did not have an embassy in
Peru but had a consulate-general in Lima.

"Staff from there are liaising with local authorities to find
out whether there was an Australian on board (the plane),'' he
said.

"There are 40 cadavers that rescue teams have pulled from the
wreckage. There could be more deaths. We assume some 60 people in
total since we've rescued 20 injured persons,'' a police officer in
Pucallpa told RPP radio.

There were foreigners among the dead, police Lieutenant David
Mori told Reuters.

The Associated Press quoted TANS spokesman Jorge Belevan as
saying that 16 foreigners were among the 92 passengers and eight
crew members, including 11 Americans, one Australian, one Spaniard
and two Italians.

Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo said in a televised address
there were between 20 and 30 survivors, but Belevan said there were
52, including two crew members.

"The pilot said we'd be there in 10 minutes, but the turbulence
was strong. . . . We felt a fierce impact, there were flames and
fires around us,'' said passenger Yuri Salas.

Lieutenant Mori said the search for bodies stopped at nightfall
and would restart at daylight on Wednesday because the plane
crashed in a swamp area and was not easily accessible by road.

TANS said it would send two planes with medicine and rescue
teams early tomorrow.

Peru's air accident investigation commission will
convene in Pucallpa on Wednesday to interview survivors and
attempt to retrieve the aircraft's black boxes, which it said would
be taken to Washington for analysis.

It was the third major accident involving an airliner in less
than two weeks, after crashes in Greece and Venezuela.

In January 2003, a TANS aircraft slammed into a hill in
Peru's northern jungle, killing all 46 people on board.

Belevan told reporters that 92 passengers and eight crew,
including the pilots, were on board the plane, which left Lima for
Pucallpa en route to Iquitos, in the northern jungle near the
Colombian and Brazilian borders.

Iquitos is the largest city in the Peruvian jungle, the
navigation gateway to the Amazon and a popular tourist site.

"The plane was about to land in Pucallpa . . . but it was caught
in a crosswind. . . . It did not crash, it was an emergency
landing,'' Belevan said.

He added that the aircraft was built in 1983 and TANS had
recently rented it from a South African company.

"The weather was really terrible, there was a fierce storm at
the time,'' a police officer in Pucallpa said.

Police and survivors said many passengers suffered severe burns
and broken limbs and were being treated in Pucallpa hospital.

A regional official praised medical staff at the Pucallpa's
three hospitals, who abandoned strike action to attend to the
wounded.

Photographs of the crash site shown by TV station Canal N showed
local people joining in the rescue effort.

TANS, founded in the 1960s by the Peruvian air force to help
serve remote jungle communities, became a commercial airline
in 1998.

It has around 30 percent of the local market, focusing on routes
often neglected by its competitors.

Peru's deadliest air crash was on Febuary 29, 1996, when a
Boeing 737 owned by the defunct Faucett Airline crashed in the
Andes as it prepared to land in Arequipa, 1,000 km south of Lima.
All 117 passengers and six crewmembers were killed.